The great difficulty in the Academic Community in acknowledging Ayn Rand as a legitimate scholar is that if she is treated as a scholar then they must accept debate at the philosophical level she initiated it. She like Aristotle, began with essentials. The essential that strikes terror into the heart of a contemporary academic is her proposition that it can be proved that words and thought are not arbitrary constructs but must be logically derived from the direct perception of an objective reality. Scholars have quick minds and they can tell from a proposition what are its implications. Ayn Rand's validated proposition that words, for intelligible communication, require exact definitions derived from verifiable facts of reality is what terrifies academics. What today's scholars are able to grasp is that if Miss Rand and Aristotle are right, then their house of Platonic, Kantian, Analytic, Marxian, Pragmatic, deconstructionist, feminist, radical cards is false. Nothing scares an academic like the fear of discovering one's lifetime of intellectual effort is the last step of a dead end path. It is unfortunate that the emotional response of academics is so fear driven. If they could realize the opportunity that being a pioneer on the right path represents they would all rush to publish the great breakthrough work that Miss Rand's work makes possible. The real advantage of discovering that the last 2400 years have been in the wrong direction is being able to go in the right direction. In a discussion with Miss Rand in the 70's I said to her that I believed that if she were right philosophically, then all of her propositions should be able to be reached by the scientific method. The key proposition I addressed for several years of reading in evolution and microbiology was her statement, "That man is a being of volitional consciousness." She made it clear in her quick insightful way that the validity of her proposition did not depend on scientific study because it was axiomatic. If man were to even state the proposition' it has to be valid. What was only obvious to me years later was that her philosophical insight cleared the way to find the correct path of scientific inquiry by recognizing the false premises on which most of todays work is based. In fact evolutionary biology has to grant her proposition to ask or deny the question, "How did volition evolve?" Just as today we have come to understand the essentials of the evolution of living from non-living we will have to do the work of finding out how volition evolved from living non-volitional life to man. The scientists who will write the great papers will have to grant her premises and thereby acknowledge her genius in order to do the work of the future. Once the torrent of new work based on her philosophically correct theory of knowledge begins to pour forth there will be no question of Miss Rand's contribution or worth. The mystery will be what took so long and her greatest tribute will be the all the comments, "But its obvious." Thanks to Miss Rand mankind can see again. The discussion of Ayn Rand will lead to essentials and once again scholars will read the great opening lines of Aristotle's "Metaphysics" and see.
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